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What Was Said Archives:
Mother's
Day Proclamation 1870
Arise then...women
of this day! Sean O'Casey "You can not put a rope around the neck of an idea; you can not put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you can not confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build."
William Foster The I.W.W. free speech fight in Spokane, Washington, in 1909, was just over. It had been a very bitter struggle, with hundreds of arrests and beatings, but it ended victoriously for the workers. Now our problem was to find jobs for those just released from jail. Harry Black had a suggestion. Black had been through the fight and had conducted himself well. He was a Western floating worker, a ranch-hand, miner, logger, construction worker. Alive and energetic, he voiced the typical I.W.W. bitter hatred of the bosses. Black’s idea was this: A contractor had offered him some sewer digging on a sub-contracting basis. Black proposed that he take the sub-contract, which involved no financial outlay for him, and that we wobblies be his workers. As a good I.W.W., Black said he opposed exploitation of the workers, so he would make the sewer-digging job a “home” for us. He, himself, would be satisfied to make merely regular day wages. Nobody but wobblies would be given work. We had nothing to lose, so we took it on. For a few days everything went fine. Black worked in the ditch with us; and we joked, smoked and talked of revolution as we dug. This easy-going arrangement did not slow the job; if anything, we did more than a usual day’s work. Soon, however, Black began to change. He became impatient with our talk; he complained that it interfered with the work; he spent more and more time on the top, “looking down our collars” as we worked. In short, he started to “rawhide” us. Black was fast taking on the typical employer’s psychology. He was one of those who are quick to seek emancipation by climbing out of their class over the shoulders of their fellow workers. It is the type that gives birth to spies, strike-breakers and corrupt leaders. Lurking beneath his thin veneer of working-class revolutionary phrases had lain the seed of petty-bourgeois greed, planted there by his capitalist environment. Black was giving just one more illustration of the truth of Marx’s great principle that the way people get their living determines their social outlook. Black’s progress capitalist-wards was swift. IN the third week of our job he fired one of our gang for not doing enough work. Then he gave up eating dinner with us, and no more did he join in our revolutionary talk. He even complained against the union and hired two non-wobblies. Meanwhile, we were boiling higher and higher with resentment. Things came to an open break when he took on the non-unionists. We struck. Whereupon Black denounced the union like any capitalist and called in the police to help smash our strike. He did not succeed, however, as the I.W.W. in Spokane was strong and militant. The general contractor, who had urgent need of the work, stepped in, eliminated the sub-contractor, Black, and reinstated the discharged workers. Then we returned to work. Thus ended Black’s experiment at combining I.W.W.-ism and capitalism. But Black had had a taste of exploiting workers. The capitalist tiger instinct in him was roused. No more working for wages, no more revolution, no more I.W.W. for him. He was now out to “get his.” Years later I ran across him, a non-union contractor in that haven of open-shoppers, Los Angeles. The capitalist class had recruited another bitter labor hater.
Tim Buck – Steps To Power Under capitalism there can be no equilibrium and no peace. The varying intensity of the class struggle in not a result of the machinations of bad capitalists modified at times by the “justness” of good capitalists, any more than it is due to the efforts of “professional agitators”. It flows from the ceaseless struggle on the part of capitalists to increase their profits, and on the part of workers to maintain their standard of living. Fluctuations and working class defeats must occur – and will continue – so long as the aim of those controlling the labour movement is social peace. Because that in turn demands a measure of social equilibrium which the very nature of the capitalism renders impossible. Our problem and the aim of this booklet is to direct our activities and the activities of our organizations so that, instead of merely functioning as a kind of bargain counter across which officials continually haggle with the boss in a futile effort to maintain a balance between wages and the cost of living, our organizations will also engage in struggles for more fundamental things; which struggles n turn, while strengthening the unions, will bring them into direct conflict with capitalism as a system.
Tim
Buck “We are engaged voluntarily in a struggle to consolidate around our party the revolutionary workers in Canada, make the relationship between our party and its non-communist supporters inseparable, division between our movement and the general labor movement indistinguishable, and to help the working class come forward stronger and stronger to take the leadership of the nation.”
Communist Party of Greece (KKE) http://inter.kke.gr , http://ar.kke.gr , mailto:cpg@int.kke.gr We follow the important developments in Iran. We express our solidarity with the communists, the members and the friends of Tudeh Party, the working people who struggle for the people’s social and democratic rights, for social progress. We condemn the repressive policy that under the responsibility of the Iranian government and the security authorities led to the death and the arrest of fighters of the popular movement. We demand the immediate release of the arrested people and generally the political prisoners who struggle for the peoples interests. At the same time we explicitly reject every attempt to take advantage of this situation for the escalation of the imperialist intervention in the region. In any case the Iranian people have the right to determine the course of their country themselves. The development of the anti-imperialist struggle with the labour movement at its forefront, constitutes a prerequisite for the repulse of the imperialist plans and every attempt of the bourgeois forces to manipulate the people so as to bring about positive changes in favour of the people. 09. 01.2010 The Press Bureau of the CC of KKE |
